Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 10

AS I PLEASE XXI: CHRISTMAS EDITION

Christmas, as Hans Gruber once remarked during a heist at Nakatomi Plaza, is the time for miracles. It's also a time for taking stock of the gifts life has given you, and that you have given yourself. So here we go:

* This year I managed to make travel once more part of my life. Aside from a few familiar places, I went to Dallas, Montreal, Quebec City and Miami, and in each place had experiences I will remember for the rest of my life, albeit in very different contexts. As much as I hate the act of traveling, I do very much enjoy being where I'm at, and in 2024 I plan on exploring as much unfamiliar territory as time and budget allow.

* I have now lost somewhere between fifteen and sixteen pounds since June. There is still a lot of work to do in this department -- I'd like to lose another 5 - 10 lbs, and then begin packing the muscle back on -- but everyone has to start somewhere and even a massive journey can be undertaken if one breaks it down into manageable stages.

* I'm something of a whore for literary awards, finding them compensation of a sort for all the frustrations and indignities a writer must endure, one of which is poverty, but this year was a rough one in that regard until SINNER'S CROSS took the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal in Historical Fiction. I had a good time in Miami and hope to return there next year for a new medal for a different book -- once a whore, always a whore.

* In Miami I met Burke Allen, who invited me to appear on the "Burke Allen's Big Time Talker Podcast," which streams on every platform imaginable. I recorded the show with him a few weeks ago and found him a superb host: the pace was fast, his questions were extremely incisive, and forced me to dig deep in what I laughably refer to as my mind for answers. The podcast should be live in a week or two.

* In Miami, aside from being able to attend the Festival of Books, I was also able to reconnect with an old teacher of mine, Scott Johnson, whose novel THROUGH THE WITCHES' STONE, took Bronze in the fantasy category. Scott's a great guy who regaled me with tales of visiting Hemingways' home in Key West, which is now upon my list of places I need to see.

* Because time waits for no man and I'm already a half-century old, I have set up an ambitious schedule of self-promotion in the coming year. You may have the chance to see my face -- or avoid it -- on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram before long, doing interviews, telling stories, and reviewing books, movies and television shows. I also plan on releasing audiobook versions of my novels, novellas and short stories. I have a few narrators in mind aside from yours truly, who (ahem) considers himself a rather talented vocal artist. The point is simply that you've got to get busy living before you get busy dying.

* On the writing front, I finished -- after 6 1/2 years -- SOMETHING EVIL, my epic horror novel. The draft is a fucking mess, and I foresee at least a year's worth of revisions and redrafts before it's even close to being ready for a formal, professional edit, much less any type of publication; but the relief I experienced when I typed "the end" (I had to do it, just to make sure the wretched thing was really dead!) was monumental.

* EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (my fifth novel) is now available for pre-order on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle download. I slated it to drop on New Year's Eve, in large part because I realized I have released nothing new in 2023, and that doesn't sit well with me. EXILES was a big accomplishment for me in many ways: I tried a new genre, wrote the book quickly, and enjoyed the process enormously. CHRONICLES is something new for me: the stories are set in an alternate reality and follow, at various distances and through various eyes, the rise, fall, and possible resurrection of Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man whose unrestrained ambition wrecks the world several times over. A study of the effects of power on men, technology on people, and ambition on history, while taking equal interest in the accidents and absurdities that take equal part in unfolding events, it evokes vaguely DUNE-like vibes in its presupposition that fiction can be used to explore not only human nature but the systems human beings create to govern themselves and their world. That at any rate was the working ideal.

* I also began, and am in the process of finishing, the third CAGE LIFE novel, DARK TRADE, which whose first draft will be complete before New Year's Eve. This is the first time I've returned to the world of "crime noir" since 2016, and reuniting with my troubled protagonist, Mickey, and the various femme fatales, thugs and cops who populate his world was a bit like going on a date with a beautiful but dangerous woman: exciting, but highly unpredictable. CAGE LIFE was my first completed novel, my first published work, the first fiction I ever wrote that won an award -- the list of "firsts" is endless, and so I have quite a soft spot for the series. At the same time, I find writing it a thoroughly professional experience, because I am not attempting to be profound or "literary," merely entertaining, albeit in a somewhat more thoughtful way than most fiction of this type aspires to be.

* This year I also read twelve books, watched 44 movies I'd never seen before, and lost myself in a few newish, and a lot of classic, television shows. I was particularly delighted to view the first few seasons of the classic LAW & ORDER, which was truly excellent and groundbreaking television before it eventually hardened into sensationalistic formula. Even more pleasurable, in a guiltier way, was KOJAK, which features some of the very best pulp dialog ever written, silkily performed by Telly Savalas. Only a three-testicle apex male like Savalas could get away with shit like this: (takes fellow cop's coffee): "I owe you a dime, sweetheart." (takes sip, grimaces, gives coffee back) "On second thought, we're even."

There is, of course, more to tell. There were silly goals I set just for the sake of knocking them off -- doing 3,500 push ups in a month, for example -- and a few extreme long shots I took trying to get my name in front of people that matter in the entertainment world, which may or may not pay off. I found more job satisfaction in what I do professionally -- advocate for victims of crime -- this year than I ever have before, albeit at some cost to my mental and spiritual health: Everyone has a threshold of how much tragedy and vicarious trauma they can stand, and the time will come when I realize I have reached mine; but that time is not yet, and years of apathy and selfishness, debauchery and entitlement have got to be paid for with years of hard, sefless work. One thing I've come to understand (belatedly, the way I come to understand everything) is that as William Shatner says, you must say "yes" to life. You must realize that you can do enormous number of things and be successful at many or even most of them. You must break out of the restrictive identities others place on you and that you place upon yourself, and realize that anything that can be done by one person can be done by another -- only vicious egotism keeps us from believing otherwise. So I will wind this ramble up by saying what another Watson is now famous for saying: the best Christmas gift you can give, the miracle you can make, is to be the best version of yourself and give that person to the world.

Merry Christmas.

IN BUT NOT OF

To paraphrase my spiritual mentor, George Orwell, I think everyone who has given any thought to the matter at all would agree that the world is in a bad way. It has arguably never been in a good way, but there are degrees of badness, and in my life I have seen some pretty low lows. I am old enough to remember the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, stagflation, Iran-Contra, a lengthy and terrifying resurgence of the Cold War, 9/11 and its aftermath, the Great Recession, Covid, and various other nerve-wracking and emotionally and financially agonizing periods. However, if I had to choose a single issue which caused me more agony and fright than all the others, it would be...everyday life.

On the surface, this is a ridiculous complaint. I am a heterosexual man of pure European descent, born in the United States to the suburban middle-middle class. In other words, I won the birth lottery. I will never be bitten by a rat in infancy, turned into a child soldier, sold to a mining company, die of sleeping sickness, or work in a sweatshop (unless Hollywood counts). I will never be subjected to Shaaria Law, forced to carry a baby to term, subjected to a clitorectomy or forced into an unwanted marriage, or get blown to bits by a missile paid for by the American taxpayer and fired by an Israeli jet. I probably won't die from drinking contaminated water, starve to death, or have to sleep in a cardboard box beneath an overpass amid the stench of exhaust and urine. I hate the word "privilege" nowadays, but I freely confess than I am privileged by circumstances of birth: a great many of the opportunities I've had (or squandered) were unearned or otherwise handed to me by God, accident, Fate, or heredity.

I nevertheless find everyday life to be an incredible trial. I do not merely mean adult responsibility, oh no. I mean that since first grade (I enjoyed Kindergarten, or at least I think I did), I found myself in an almost continual war both with society at large, and with myself, for being unable or unwilling to function as others seemed to do. It would be easy for me to say that hyperactive, attention-challenged kids with artistic natures naturally hate school and find it difficult to navigate in what we refer to as "the real world," and this is in fact true: but my rebellion goes somewhat deeper than this. Even as a small child, I found the world that I inherited not merely to be unfair and hypocritical, but nonsensical almost to the point of madness. Of course I could not articulate this as a small child; it presented me with difficultly even in high school, because I did not have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge necessary to codify what I couldn't stand about modern life without sounding like a whiny dreamer with lazy streak. And in fact I am 100% certain many people, including members of my own family, cataloged me this way, just as I am certain that I deserved at least some part of this approbrium: but I'm equally certain that the feelings that manifested as these characteristics were valid. Allow me to use one small example from school.

When I was growing up, and all the way into graduate school (the highest level of education I have completed), I saw that about 90% of the things I was being taught were taught by virtue of lectures: proof of comprehension was achieved by rote memorization followed by multiple choice tests. I knew, and it has subsequently been proven beyond any possible doubt, that this method of education does not work. In fact, it is an exact reversal of how children, how all humans, are scientifically proven to learn: by example. By doing. Getting their hands dirty. People remember dissecting a frog. They do not remember being lectured on the internal organs of a frog. Furthermore, while students generally hate essay tests, they are 100% guaranteed to expose whether the learner has actually absorbed the information and synthesized it properly, and studying for them requires by necessity a much higher level of subject mastery: you cannot guess, so you must know. Any time I was exposed to teaching which allowed me to do these things, I not only learned, I retained. Yet only 10% of my teachers did this. They had to know their methods did not work, but they either didn't care, or could not themselves deviate from the teaching formula their employers mandated they use.

I believe that I have always on some level understood the value of time. It is the most precious thing we have, and we never have enough of it, yet mine was being wasted as, year in and year out, I was forced to listen to teachers blather and drone; to memorize by rote a series of dates, places, names, formulas, equations; to fill in bubbles on a Scan Tron sheet with a No. 2 pencil; and then, to forget, with astonishing rapidity, every goddamn bit of what I had "learned." My bitterness grew as I went to college and began to pay vast sums for the privilege. By and large I learned very little, and I do not believe for a moment most of my teachers or the institutions they represented actually gave a damn. It was all, or very nearly all, complete nonsense: a dull, rigid, complex, drawn-out ritual which exists for reasons nobody really wants to admit if they even understand it at all.

The working world was no different. Studies have proven over and over (and over) again that the eight-hour workday is pointless, that early start times are deleterious to health and productivity, that happy employees work much harder of their own volition than unhappy ones, that a three-day weekend would work wonders for employers and employees both, and that things like working remote, hybrid employment, nontraditional office spaces, longer lunches, pets in the workplace, later start times, etc., etc. actually make workers much more efficient. And yet, with the exception of a few employers I encountered in the entertainment industry, every business, public or private, I've been involved with sticks mindlessly, ruthlessly, and self-destructively to the same outdated, inefficient, misery-inducing model that has existed since industrialism or before. Resistance to change is ferocious; sometimes it takes on the character of active hostility, even hatred, toward the employed. ("This is the way we do it here and if you don't like it, quit.") And this creates a negative cycle in which the employee adopts the Office Space mentality of viewing his employer as the enemy rather than a benefactor or an ally and doing only the bare-ass minimum necessary to avoid being fired. The cycle completes itself with the employer marveling in sincere if misplaced outrage that they cannot get any good people; or getting them, cannot keep them.

Society, at least in my own country, also confused and disgusted me mightily from about the age of twelve onward. I was told my country drew its philosophical roots from the Puritans and their ethic of ascetisicm, faith and hard work, but all around me what I saw was gross commercialism replacing religious belief, and a snobbery that maintained inherited wealth was more virtuous than working for a living. Like Orwell, I saw cruelty and sadism rewarded; intellect and curiosity derided; morals and decency regarded as sniveling weakness; and any actual belief systems or personal honor regarded as naivete to be exploited. I was told that military service was noble, but saw veterans treated like condom wrappers; that "freedom isn't free" but also that "middle class boys don't go into the army -- that's for poor kids." (Evidently freedom still wasn't free, but it was only the poor kids who had to pay for it.)

Some of this, of course, was simply the ordinary discrepancy that exists between ideals and reality, but more of it came from feeling as if this discrepancy was intolerable to me as a human being. Me, Miles Watson, personally. In other words, it might suit, or at least prove acceptable, to others, but I was not built for it. I couldn't go along to get along. I had to point out the absurdity, the inefficiency, the stupidity of the world around me, for the sake of my own sanity; yet this sort of talk was far from welcome to most of those around me. It was either ignored, ridiculed or actively punished; the few who agreed usually placed a caveat at the end of their agreement to the effect that, "Yeah, it's nuts, but you've got to accept it: it's the way things are." My trouble stemmed from the fact I could not accept it. To me, the choice was between swallowing the hypocrisy of society, and pointing out that virtue and money were not only unsynonymous but usually incompatible, that systems designed to help us had not only hurt us but become our masters, was not initially a choice. I felt that I had to rebel.

By now you probably think this entire essay is a form of boasting, and you'd be right to deduce this: but here comes the twist. My rebellion was a complete failure and served only to cause myself and many of those close to me great pain. I will not describe it here, except to say that I most resembled Gordon Comstock, the laughable protagonist of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who makes a "war on money" in the deluded belief that poverty and rejection of societal norms constitutes virtue. In fact, all rebels equate failure with virtue: the whole history of the punk rock movement is testament to this. It is a doomed attempt to invert the rules of society, and render the poet starving to death in his garret more noble than the upper middle class kid who thinks having to pump his own gas is "roughing it."

Of course millions of people feel as I did at any given moment. It is supreme egotism to assume that one's inner world, one's inner landscape as it were, is unique or even special; but prior to the existence of the internet there was no way for people like myself to grasp that we were, and are, far from unusual. The hermetically sealed world I grew up in did not allow for the sort of "online communities" which are a normal part of life today. Anyone who deviated from the norm too far in any direction was bound to face ridicule and hostility from his peers, his parents, his teachers, and society as a whole. Indeed, society is defined as "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community." One cannot have an ordered community, more or less, if too many people stray too far from the norms. This is pathetically obvious, but it took me decades to grasp its full meaning: individual rebellion allows a person to egoistically attack what he dislikes in his community, while still benefitting from the advantages a community offers. Too many rebels = destruction of "the system," which sounds great until the power goes out. I had always been drawn to fictional characters who were "in but not of," because I could relate to them, but I was very slow in understanding that these characters inevitably served the same system or society which rejected or marginalized them. These characters had to work within their envrionment despite their deep philosophical disagreements with how it was managed, and their persistent feelings of emotional isolation.

Around the age of 30 I tumbled to the works of Ernst Jünger, the brilliant writer, novelist, metaphysician and philosopher, who often tackled what he saw as the problems of the modern world through abstruse novels like "The Glass Bees," "Aladdin's Problem," "On the Marble Cliffs" and others. It was in his novel "Eumeswil" that I encountered the character of Manuel Venator, whose struggles (like those of Gordon Comstock, or other Orwellian characters such as George "Fatty" Bowling or even Winston Smith) seemed to resonate with me. If you will excuse me quoting from Wikipedia, "The key theme in the novel is the figure of the Anarch, the inwardly-free individual who lives quietly and dispassionately within but not of society and the world. The Anarch is a metaphysical ideal figure of a sovereign individual, [as] conceived by Jünger."

The idea of the soverign individual is worthy of study in another blog (as is the concept of self-ownership), but the point I'm driving at here is that Jünger, who was born in 1895 and died in 1998 (at the age of 102), lived through a variety of political systems: the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Allied occupation, West Germany, and finally the re-unified Germany of today. He commented that he had seen "flags fall like leaves on the ground in November" and at some point in his life seems to have made a conscious effort toward internal exile, a state in which the individual lives peacably within society but holds allegiances and moral codes inside himself which may be quite different from those of his fellows. In public, he goes along to get along; in private, he exists within his own nation-state with himself at the head.

Now, if this sounds more or less like how everyone lives once they come home from work and lock the door, it's important to stress that the condition of the anarch is merely a progression of the idea that "a man's home is his castle" and that we are, or ought to be, entirely free within our own homes. Where the anarch differs is that he takes the concept of freedom further: he creates for himself a kind of ideal plane which is transportable anywhere, including the street or the workplace. He builds an exterior which conforms to the grooves and tracks of society but he does not allow these grooves and tracks to mark his inner self. In other words, he does not internalize the values and norms of society as most people do whether they want to or not. He lives in a state of active, conscious rejection, without appearing in almost any way rebelious.

Why does this matter? Is it just a distinction without a difference, or even worse, a justification for a cowardly refusal to fight against societal injustice? Well, to start with, for those like myself, it is actually necessary for sanity and for self-respect. When you are "in but not of," society has explicity rejected you already: the question is merely whether you shatter yourself trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, or you develop a proper coping mechanism, which allows you to retain your sense of individuality and personal sovereignty. The distinction has a difference, because you are not simply "being yourself behind closed doors" -- you are "being yourself within your own mind" and refusing to let what you see as lunacy, or villainy, or stupidity seep inside of you. Is that cowardice? Many would say so. They would say that one must rebel against that which one perceives to be evil or unjust: but as I have noted above, there are some rebellions which are not only doomed to failure, they do not even achieve moral victory because they have no resonance, no impact on the larger world. Gordon Comstock's war on money achieves nothing but misery for himself and unhappiness for his friends and family: the pain ceases the moment he abandons it. Winston Smith's internal rebellion is crushed the moment it becomes external, and he himself is crushed into conformity with Oceanic society without achieving anything whatsoever. Fatty Bowling, on the other hand, realizes society is a swindle, but is willing to play the game provided he can escape through books and a few intellectual friendships. He of the three characters is closest to the anarch as Jünger envisioned him. He is, or becomes, "in but not of."

Again, all of this may seem like so much self-aggrandizing hair-splitting to the reader, or even a form of self-delsion. Perhaps it is, but I don't think so. The world we live in is insane and seems to be becoming moreso with the passage of years, and insanity, like a spill, tends to spread, and to stain. We have replaced religion with money, philosophy with psychiatry, patriotism with identity politics (or nationalism), common sense with ideology, morals with professional ethics. The consequences are inescapable if one adopts a passive internal state. Without active, conscious efforts to maintain one's own inner sense of sanity and integrity, we will, like Winston Smith, ending up loving Big Brother.

AS I PLEASE XX: HAPPY ACCIDENT EDITION

Yesterday I woke up feeling a little gloomy, because it was Sunday, and I have a lot of adult tasks to take on before, and after, I do anything enjoyable. I need to run errands. I need to do laundry and dishes. I need to pay, retroactively, for my recent trip to Miami. I need to have someone look at my alternator. None of that sounds the least bit fun. When I hit the street to get coffee, however, I noticed an unusually lively crowd upon the street, and soon realized it wasn't Sunday at all, but Saturday. The calendar in my head, never very reliable, was more confused than usual. This got me thinking about Bob Ross, and his signature remark, "We don't make mistakes in painting -- we have happy accidents."

In life, as opposed to painting, we do make mistakes which have no upside, no happiness attached to them. I have made more than my share -- quite a bit more than my share, actually. Yet the idea of the happy accident persists. The wrong turn that leads us in the right direction, the missed opportunity that leads us to a better one, the mislaid object that turns up years later at the exact moment it is most useful, are all experiences we have on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes the entire course of a life can be dictated by them. How many successful marriages, careers, and life choices are the result of a combination of careless mistakes and random chance coming together in a moment of incandescent good fortune? What follows is a short, random list of some of the happy accidents which have occurred to me, or others, and the effects the accident had upon the life in question. Some are trivial in the extreme, others incredibly profound. If one does not believe in Fate, then both call into question the role that random chance plays in our lives, the mockery it makes of all our plans and grand ambitions.

* Way back in 2002, I had a job interview scheduled for the early morning. The interview was in Maryland, and I still lived in Pennsylvania at the time, so I spent the night before at my mom's house. As I dressed, however, I realized I had forgotten my shoes. I could hardly go to the interview in a new suit and old sneakers, so I called my would-be employer, told a stupid lie about my car, and asked to reschedule for the afternoon. I then went on a farsical quest for dress shoes, only to discover absolutely nothing was open. I ended up paying $100 -- in 2023 prices, $160 -- at Banana Republic for a pair of very uncomfortable leather shoes which I seldom wore again, though they still darken my closet to this day. When at last I set out for my interview, I couldn't take my supposedly broken down car, so I hopped the Metro, which had a stop only blocks from the place I was going. Unfortunately for me, I still couldn't find it, and wandered about in ferocious late-summer heat as the time dwindled and sweat wilted my collar. At last, by sheer chance, I blundered into the business at the very stroke of the appointment time. I was flushed, out of breath, and uncomfortable (the shoes pinched). A secretary handed me a sheet of paper with questions I was going to be asked during the interview, and I left sweat-fingerprints on it. I both looked at felt like a disaster. I decided, right then and there, to chalk it all up as a loss. I went into the interview already having given up, and made no attempt to be impressive. I make jokes about my appearance. My to the answers to the questions were flip. I gave every impression of not giving a damn about whether I got the job or not, and walked out laughing at how badly the entire day had gone from the very beginning. You know what's coming, of course: I got the job. And I not only got the job, I got the $10,000 increase in salary from my previous job I had blithely demanded, which necessitated getting a promotion before I had even been hired. I had beaten out better qualified candidates on the strength of my utter indifference, which itself was the result of a series of stupidities on my part.

* In 1936, George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side. The Loyalists were a conglomeration of center and left parties which had remained loyal (hence the name) to the Spanish government and were fighting the Fascist-backed revolt of General Franco. These parties, which included socialists, communists, anarchists and constitutionalists of the more traditional democratic type, did not get along. Orwell had originally joined a Marxist militia called the Party of Marxist Unification, which refused to take its orders from Moscow (meaning Stalin) and was therefore unpopular with orthodox Communists. Orwell, whose political opinions were still forming at the time, was never content in this militia and wanted to fight for a purely Communist brigade, mainly because it saw more action at the front than his own outfit, the 29th. However, the day he was supposed to "see a man" about a transfer while on leave in Madrid, he found himself with indigestion from a too-heavy meal, and missed the appointment. Thus, he was still a member of the 29th Division when the Loyalist government suppressed the Party of Marxist Unification via a series of mass arrests. Orwell barely managed to escape Spain with his life, but before he did he saw firsthand his own group unfairly villified in the press and its members condemened to prisons without trial and in many cases, shot. The atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and betrayal haunted him for the rest of his life; so too did his understanding that the press, and history, could be altered to serve the whims of the ruling party. These fears proved the basis not only of his world view and politics generally, but led to "1984," which he wrote years later and changed the world forever. Had he transferred to the communist side, he admitted he would have been spared the purges and probably believed the official "line" that the Party of Marxist Unification had betrayed the government. The course of literary history was changed because he ate too much at lunch.

* When I was in college, I desperately wanted to join a certain fraternity. It was the only one on campus that I saw myself comfortably a part of, because it had no typical member. It was comprised of jocks, drunks, drug-users, artists, brawlers, brains, playboys and nerds. It is typical of my brain, however, that the more important something is to me, the more liklely I am to forget to do it, and on the night I was supposed to meet the brothers for an initial interview, I went to a house party and got drunk off my ass. By sheer chance I encountered another youngster on their way to an interview of their own, and tore an unteady path to the Student Union, arriving just in the nick of time. I am not the sort of drunk who shows their drunkenness: I don't slur words, stumble, or become belligerent or silly. I do, however, become more relaxed and confident, with all my social anxiety nicely boiled. The combination of having no time to worry about the interview and being accidentally plastered made me the perfect interviewee: the guy doing the questioning remarked, "You're hell in an interview, man!" I got a bid, pledged, was initiated, and thirty years later still count among the members of that fraternity many of my closest friends. All because I forgot I had the appointment and got lit up on warm, flat, cheap brew.

* In 1969, my friend William returned to New York City from a tour in Vietnam bearing deep physical and emotional scars. He was embittered by his experiences and by the difficulties he was having readjusting to civilian life -- unfortunately a very typical problem both for Nam vets and war veterans in general. One night, feeling footloose, he was on his way to a card game in Brooklyn when he passed a long line of young men waiting for entrance to a building. He asked one of them what they were waiting for. "A police entrance exam," came the reply. "To hell with it," he said, and joined the line, foregoing his card game. He took the test, passed, and was offered a spot in the next academy class. Twenty years later he retired a detective lieutenant, and went on to become a very successful private investigator, fiction and non-fiction author, and a Ph.D in Criminal Justice. All because he chose taking an exam over a seat at a poker table.

* In 2005, I met a beautiful girl for whom I fell head over heels. We dated briefly, and seemed to have the right chemistry for a serious relationship, but she was leaving to study abroad and I thought that was the end of it. Several years later I was in a now-extinct bar and ducked my head briefly into the poolroom. I don't know why: I wasn't looking for anyone, nor did I have an especial desire to play pool. I just walked in and walked out, then resumed my seat at the bar with my friends. A few moments later The Girl in Question appeared. She said she'd been shooting a game with friends of her own, saw me walk in, and followed me to my stool. She was single. I was single. We became a couple, and a few months later we moved to Los Angeles together. I had been fat (so speak) fat and happy where I was in life: I had a terrific apartment, a comfortable life, a wide circle of friends. My only real issue was a nagging feeling that I could do a lot more with my life, and that time was running out for me to do it. She proved the catalyst to up-end that particular hourglass and start life over anew, in a different place, where the risks and the stakes were both considerably higher. I spent the next twelve and a half years in L.A. All because of a random impulse to see what was going on next door.

* Speaking of L.A., and to wind up this Sunday entry of As I Please, here is a story I may have told before, but, well, never get tired of telling, because it seems to walk a fractured line between serendipity, luck, destiny and fate. Twenty-three years ago, I was at one of those periodic low points which help describe the arc of our lives on this planet. I was recently and unhappily single, bored and frustrated with my job, and struggling badly with my finances. I lived in a rather barren neighborhood, had serious issues with my car and therefore my social life, and my weekends were dismal: oftimes I wouldn't say a word to another human being between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. My sole interaction was a Sunday visit to the McDonald's drive-thru where I would order breakfast and coffee; my sole moment of happiness, or at least contentment, was an hour of sheer escapism. This came in the form of a show called The Lost World which aired on Sunday mornings. I'd eat, drink, and watch this sexier, somewhat more adult version of Land of the Lost, a childhood favorite, and for that hour remember what it was like to be footloose and fancy free, without adult responsibilities, worries and woes. I'd also permit myself the conceit of imagining myself in Hollywood, participating in the fabulous (I thought) world of make-believe. In point of fact, I'd sometimes sing the lyrics to 3 Doors Down's song "Be Like That:"

He spends his nights in California
Watching the stars on the big screen
Then he lies awake and he wonders
"Why can't that be me?"
'Cause in his life he's filled with all these good intentions
He's left a lot of things he'd rather not mention right now
Just before he says goodnight
He looks up with a little smile at me and he says
If I could be like that
I would give anything
Just to live one day in those shoes
If I could be like that
What would I do?
What would I do? Yeah....

Now in dreams we run

Cut to twenty years later, and I am on my way to a Halloween party in Los ANgeles. I stop off at my friend's house so we can go as a group, and lo and behold, there is a beautiful blonde present. It turns out to be the former star of The Lost World. I get an unexpected chance to tell her how her show provided the spiritual morphine I needed to get through a tough time in life, and the following year, she is my red carpet date at the Writers of the Future Awards in Hollywood. My sole remaining wish is that I could travel back in time and tell the 2000-ish version of myself that, well, now in dreams we are.

Was it chance? Was it the sort of happy accident to which Bob Ross liked to refer? Or was it Fate, or God's will, or some other sort of blind inevitability that surpasseth human understanding? I don't suppose I will ever know. What I do know is that whether it is all written in stone somewhere we cannot see, or whether it really is nothing but a series of random dice-rolls which occasionally run to hot streaks, it happened, and, thankfully, will happen again. We cannot avoid accidents, but the happier ones, like an episode of The Joy of Painting are always welcome.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MURDER, SHE WROTE"

I may be wrong, but frankly, I doubt it. -- Jessica Fletcher

I confess: I did it. I watched all twelve seasons of MURDER, SHE WROTE and the four full-length TV movies which followed its cancellation. That's 264 episodes (not including the movies) and boy, did that take some time -- and by time, I mean a couple of years. I don't actually remember when I began my quest, but it was probably 2020 or so. Why did I do this? Why spend those hours watching a rigidly formulaic, cozy mystery show that ran its course decades ago? The answer, on the surface anyway, is profoundly simple: I enjoyed it. There is a deeper mystery, however, to why I was able to stick with the project, and for once, it is not "nostalgia." We will however address that riddle presently. For now -- and I'm going to resort to these cheap puns through this whole blog, so you may as well resign yourself -- to cases.

For those of you living on Mars who have never heard of it, MURDER, SHE WROTE ran for a mind-boggling 12 seasons, from September 30, 1984, to May 19, 1996, and could have run longer if not for the stupidity of network executives, whose salaries are always in inverse proportion to their cranial capacities. It is by far one of the most successful and iconic TV shows of all time, when its star, Angela Lansbury, died recently at the age of 95, there was an outpouring of public grief which far exceeded that which is normal for a television star of yesteryear. It had a deeply personal quality to it, as one experiences when a distant but beloved relation passes away. There are, of course, many iconic TV shows, but MSW was different from most, because it did not utilize an ensemble cast. Nearly all the eggs were in Lansbury's basket, and she carried them so well that many people born after the show's cancellation are as familiar with it as those who watched it live on television in the 80s and 90s.

The premise of MSW was almost comically simple. Jessica Fletcher, a widowed, recently retired schoolteacher in the small, seaside New England town of Cabot Cove, writes a mystery novel to alleviate her grief and boredom. Her witless nephew Grady (Michael Horton) sends it off to a publisher without her knowledge, and before she knows it, she's a bestselling author. Jessica's lively imagination, keen eye for observation and her deductive faculties, however, make her an ideal amateur sleuth in real life. And since people seem to be murdered whenever Jessica is around, she naturally puts these talents to use by tracking down the killers, usually much to the annoyance of the local police, and the relief of whatever person has been wrongfully accused of the crime. Sometimes those police are the Cabot Cove sheriffs, the bumbling but goodhearted Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), and later, the tougher and sharper Mort Metzger (Ron Māsak), respectively; but when Jessica travels, as she frequently does to promote or research her next novel, well, there's always a harassed, bumbling local cop on hand who either fights incessantly with her or rather pitifully seeks out her aid. At home, Jessica's best friend, the crusty town doctor Seth Hazlett (William Windom), who refers to her sharply as "woman," is her principal confidant, sounding board, and sparring partner: unlike everyone else in town, he is not in awe of her, a fact she seems to enjoy and appreciate. While on the road, Jessica occasionally had the help of private eyes like Harry McGraw (Jerry Orbach) or Charlie Garrett (Wayne Rogers), or secret agent Michael Hagerty (Len Cariou), all of whom cause her as much trouble as they alleviate. No matter what the circumstances, however, Jessica will get her man -- or her woman, by the final credits.

Running as long as it did, MSW employed a staggering number of actors, many of whom later became famous: Joaquin Phoenix, Bryan Cranston, Linda Hamilton, George Clooney, and Neil Patrick Harris (to name a few) all made guest appearances on the show in the infancy or early stages of their careers. Indeed, a sort of sport can be had in spotting such people, as well as legendary character actors or faded stars from the golden age of cinema, many of whom it is rumored Lansbury insisted on employing, just to keep them working.

The most startling aspect of MSW is the rigidity of its formula. A standard episode goes like this:

1. Jessica arrives in town (unless she's in Cabot Cove, in which case she's already there). Here she meets an old friend or makes a new one. She also meets a rotten creep who everyone overtly or covertly wishes would die, especially said friend. Before the second or third commercial, the creep is found murdered, and the friend becomes the prime suspect.

2. With the help or hinderance of the local constabulary, Jessica investigates the crime in the hopes of clearing her friend's name, discovering that many others had motive, means and opportunity to commit the murder: she interrogates them and makes a general nuisance of herself, sometimes to the point of becoming targeted by the killer herself. The cops stolidly insist on the guilt of her friend and refuse to investigate anyone else. (A common refrain is: "We already have the killer, Mrs. Fletcher!")

3. Via a small epiphany at the last moment, usually prompted by noticing some small detail such as a stain, a torn piece of clothing, an offhand remark, etc., Jessica realizes who the killer is, and either tricks them into giving themselves away within earshot of the police, or confronts them in the standard Agatha Christie drawing-room fashion, identifying the murderer before the others, explaining how the murderer tripped themselves up and extracting the inevitable confession.

There were, of course, variations on the theme: sometimes the friend in need was a relative, or a friend of a friend, an enemy, or even Jessica herself; and sometimes the killer turned out to be someone outside the pack of "usual suspects," such as the investigating police officer, or the very person who pleaded for her assistance at the beginning of the episode. There were a few stories that had overtones of horror or international intrigue, while some were broadly very comedic. All were recognizably part of the same pattern and concluded in almost precisely the same last-second-rescue manner. In some stories, the apprehension of the criminal was more tragic than triumphant, and at least one episode where it is implied that full justice was not done with the outcome; but the criminal was always caught. In this regard, i.e. from a purely structural standpoint, MURDER, SHE WROTE was virtually identical to PERRY MASON.

I grant that small concessions were made to the passage of time. In later seasons, Jessica relocates partially to New York City, ditches her trademark typewriter for a word processor, and seems to embrace more fully the fact she is no longer a widowed former schoomarm scribbling stories at her kitchen table, but a bestselling and internationally famous author. However, none of these things played a significant role in the show or caused any alteration of its formula. Fashion changed. Technology changed. Sets changed. MSW did not.

So where does this leave us? What is the legacy of MURDER, SHE WROTE? Is it still worth watching after all these years, or is it best consigned to the realm of fond memories which can only remain fond if left unexamined? Is there anything we can learn from its success or its ultimate demise?

Let's start with why the show ran so long, why it worked, why it became iconic even in the eyes of those who can't help but mock its rigid formula, its predictability, its ridiculous conceits and frequently cheesy endings.

MURDER, SHE WROTE was comfort food in the sense that the audience knew what was coming from the opening frame. In a sense it was like watching the same play, over and over again, with different actors using a different backdrop. The differences were sufficient to keep it interesting, and the similarities sufficient not to overchallenge the audience. And from its pilot episode very clear on the fact that it possessed a moral compass. As much as the audience enjoyed the loathsome villain getting killed off in the second act, Jessica made it plain in each and every episode that there was never -- never -- a justification for murder. I may be overplaying my hand here, but in this ultra-cynical and morally relitavistic age, a woman with a strong sense of propriety, excellent manners and unwavering moral standards was quite refreshing. Just as her sidekick Dr. Hazlett represented the crusty conservative who dislikes all change, Jessica was a throwback to a time when decency was regarded as strength and not naivete. Another attraction was its lack of attraction:
the fact that the show was so steadfastly, unabashedly unsexy. That is not to say there weren't beautiful women and handsome men on hand, or sub-plots driven by lust, tawdry affairs, sexual obsessions, etc.; but rather that the appeal of the show did not lie with the physical charisma of Angela Lansbury, who even as a very young woman in the 1960s (see THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) had the appearance of middle age, or with that of the character she portrayed, who was straight-laced, frumpy, formal, and generally uninterested in romance. Like STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who was haughty and reserved, middle-aged and bald, yet won the hearts of millions of fans around the world, Jessica's appeal lay in her intelligence and strength of character.

This deliberate unsexiness also extended to the spirit of the series itself. It did not rely on the stylstic tricks many shows use to lure viewers: flashy cars, technology, bikini babes, throbbing musical soundtracks. In fact, it periodically made fun of such devices by pitting Jessica against Hollywood executives determined to dumb-down and sex up her mysteries for the silver screen. MSW nearly always retained the air of a "cozy mystery" while providing just enough action to remind the audience there were higher stakes than the mere solution of an intellectual problem.

Why is this a good thing? Well, for starters, it forced the writers to make a serious (if by no means always a successful) attempt to produce stories which were inherently interesting even without the afformentioned bells and whistles. More tangibly, it gave us a protagonist who was relatable in the sense of looking like an actual human being and having no particular appetite for adventure or the so-called finer things in life. She retained the house she had always lived in, never owned a car, and when traveling, her favorite order from room service was "tea and toast," a combination sufficiently boring to remind us of our spinster aunts rather than some female version of James Bond. And this brings me to my last point, no far distance from the previous: Jessica solved mysteries with a combination of moral courage and sheer intellect. She had neither brawn nor sex appeal to fall back on: she was neither enforcer nor seducer. Tom Baker once famously remarked of his character, Doctor Who, that he was a man who thought rather than shot his way out of trouble, and this applies to Jessica as well. Heroes who shoot down their enemies are as common as dirt: rare is the one who brings them down without so much as clenching a fist, much less picking up a gun.

All of this is a way of saying that the principal legacy of MURDER, SHE WROTE is that despite being hopelessly dated in contour and form, it is timeless, because it rests on eternal virtues and an eternal peculiarity: human beings love a mystery and will keep tugging at that knot until it unravels. Watching it now, in the 2020s, I found it the best kind of escapism, one that draws you in and poses a challenge but does not overtax either your brain or your emotions, and, like a theme-park ride, ends in a predictable way. MURDER, SHE WROTE stands in my mind as a testament to the fact that audiences are not as shallow, cruel, or dopamine-addled as modern network executives and writers believe them to be.

As long as it ran, MSW could have run longer, but those same executives decided to shorten the shooting schedule per episode, which overtaxed Angela Lansbury; they also made the quintessential studio suit mistake of switching its time slot, a blunder which killed more successful TV shows than can be counted. So what we can learn from its demise is that oldest of axioms: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

When I walk down Memory Lane, I am usually in a nostalgic mood. Rewatching MURDER, SHE WROTE did not evince much if any nostalgia in me. It simply reminded me that there is a place -- a very large place -- in television, and in film and fiction, for heroes who do not wear capes, who do not shoot guns, who do not win beauty contests, and who wouldn't pay you a penny for caviar and champagne if tea and toast were on the menu.

ART AND ABOMINATION

George Orwell's least understood essay concerns Salvador Dali, the notorious artist-cum-provocateur (or provacateur-cum-artist) of the previous century. Orwell was so passionately devoted to freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of thought that people can be forgiven if they assume he was also against censorship: but anyone who has read "Benefit of Clergy," his scathing attack on Dali's autobiography which appeared in 1944, must come away with a somewhat different conclusion. After giving a precis of Dali's disgusting personal habits and artistic tastes as outlined (and glamorized) in the book, which include such things as necrophilia, coprophagia, and various forms of sadism, Owell writes the following:

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.

One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another "King Lear." And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Orwell stops short of saying the work of Dali must be banned, but if this is not the strongest form of encouragement towards a boycott in every sense of the word -- artistic, commercial, aesthetic, moral -- such a thing does not exist. Orwell is intelligent enough to understand the consequences of banning 'art'; but he is too intelligent to let the word 'art' become a shield and buckler for every degenerate, vile, obscene, disgusting impulse held by mankind. He demands accountability both for the so-called artist and for the audience who pays for it. He is taking a stand for art, but also for decency, and it must be said that he falls farther on the side of decency than art. When he refers to the public hangman, he is no doubt putting himself in the hangman's shoes.

The line between art and obscenity was much on my mind today, due to an accident common to the internet era. While going through an inconcievably tedious list of criminal cases due for trial, I was listening to various documentaries on European directors. One led me to Pier Passolini, the famous (and notorious) Italian poet and film director who is perhaps best remembered for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a film not many people can watch without vomiting. There seem to be two schools of thought on the movie: the first is that it is a work of great genius and has tremendous artistic merit as an allegory about consumerism, fascism and the pathology -- or anarchy -- of power; the second, in the words of one critic, is that it is "nearly unwatchable, extremely disturbing, and often literally nauseous".

I have no intention of giving a recitation of all the disgusting and depraved things this film offers. Just doing the small amount of research necessary to write this blog quite put me off my lunch -- and I have attended autopsies. Suffice to say that one of the story acts is called "The Circle of Shit," and believe me, this is not metaphorical. My point is that there are many reputable people in the world of cinema and art who regard "Salò" as a work of authentic genius, possessing real literary merit, rather than an obscenity which ought to be burned by the public hangman. Some say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but this begs the question: are all beholders sane? Are all aesthetic viewpoints equally valid? Is there no objective truth in art, no minimal standard of decency which must be adhered to? Does merely calling oneself an artist, or even sincerely believing that one is contributing something of actual artistic merit to the community at large no matter how vile it may appear on the surface, grant one the "benefit of clergy" Orwell was referring to?

Orwell certainly understood the "slippery slope" of civics: the restriction of one freedom inevitably leads to the restrictions of others. At the same time, he grasped that there are moral absolutes which transcend the artist's claim of immunity, and was unafraid to point out this fact. As it happens, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom of speech, but we cannot yell "fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Nor can we share military secrets in time of war. Nor can we incite people to riot, or encourage the violent overthrow of our government, or even slander or libel a fellow human being. Such restrictions on speech exist for the greater good of humanity, but they also exist to draw a deep line in the sand, and tell the forces of moral anarchy, "This far and no father." They exist as a boundary line between the ordinary, more or less "decent" person, and those who seek to exploit the law to further their own twisted aims. You may recall a previous blog of mine in which I detailed how Harvey Weinstein made a definite attempt to normalize his own perversions in the movie "The Burning." Subsequent events have only reinforced my belief that many others are doing precisely the same thing through various artistic mediums. Instead of trying to conform to societal norms, they are doing their damndest to change what is normal: instead of imposing discipline on their own bestial natures, they are trying mightily to convince us there is nothing wrong with them.

In my own artistic works, if I may be permitted to call them artistic, you will undoubtedly encounter some very disturbing things, but I fancy that anyone who reads my fiction would quickly grasp that there is an underlying morality, however deeply it is buried within the story. Even if this is not perceptible to you (in which case I have probably failed in my duty as a writer), it is probably possible to divine what my motives were when I set pen to paper. And it is the question of motive rather than execution that this whole tricky problem uneasily rests. For there are three basic motives to the self-described artist:

1. To entertain.
2. To provoke.
3. To destroy.


When I write a short story, or a novella, or a novel, or any other damned thing, my first motive is always to entertain, by which I mean not necessarily offering mere entertainment, but also enlightenment and education, if the story lends itself to that sort of thing and if I am as a writer am capable of delivering it. I may very well fail in my effort, but entertainment is at any rate is my main objective. If I lower myself to be merely provocative, it is usually as a stylistic trick, to lure the audience back toward my central goal of entertainment -- of holding their interest, and perhaps providing food for thought. I cannot think of anything I've ever written which was purely provocative in the Howard Stern sense of the word, i.e. outrageous for the sake of garnering attention, without the possession of any other motive. The brutal fact is that it is usually one without talent -- but as in the case of Dali, sometimes with considerable talent but no moral compass -- who uses provocation, or shock, as a form of advertising pure and simple. Provocation can have deeper merit if it is employed to spark debate, but the line between provocateur and carnival barker is very fine indeed, and great men have stumbled over it without realizing they had done so, which is sufficient reason in my mind for treating this approach with great caution.

There is however a lower form of artistry than this, one in which quotes around "artistry" must be used as a form of segregation, lest the rest of us be tainted with his stench: the "artist" whose art is a Trojan Horse, created for the express purpose of normalizing his perversions and prejudices. Weinstein tried to do this with "The Burning," albeit in a rather subtle way, but in recent years the subtley of this approach has shed its own skin and become much more blatant. The existence of the internet has allowed a veritable parade of perverts and freaks to seek out others like themselves, form "communities," and begin the process of normalizing themselves in the public eye, and there is no better method for achieving this than through art -- the most readily consumable form of art being television and film.

At this point I should pause to remind the reader that I am politically a centrist with some libertarian leanings. I love freedom and I hate bullying, cant, and cruelty. I try very hard to tolerate those with different opinions or lifestyles even when those opinions or lifestyles leave me something worse than cold, since I believe any baggage I have in those directions is mine to carry. But I refuse to equate tolerance and non-aggression with moral blindness. I refuse to accept moral relativism. I refuse to be lumped in with the degenerate freaks who call themselves artists simply because it's a convenient refuge for their perversions. Art is not synonymous with irresponsibility. It is not a "get out of jail free" card. The artist has no benefit of clergy: he is free to do as he chooses but not free from the consequences of his choices, which includes boycott, and in the most extreme circumstances, and following the necessary legal procedures to determine same, censorship, as the "art" of extreme pornographic filmmakers like Rob Zaccari and Paul Little was censored. I will not hesitate to stand up and shout at poseurs and frauds who masquerade as artists while pushing nefarious ideologies or personal agendas on the sly. And I will hold myself accountable to these standards, and expect others to hold me to them as well. I should rather that, than to be tarred with the same filthy brush.

In the present age, when a systematic effort is being made to destroy age-old notions of morality, it is reasonable to cast a suspicious eye on those who seek to provoke and disgust only to "scuttle like rats" behind the First Amendment, when it is so obvious where their ultimate motive lies. By their motives and not by their works you shall know them.

AS I PLEASE XIX: ME VERSUS MY BRAIN

Tonight I walked out of the longest preliminary hearing I have ever attended -- over five hours in length. The ordinary "prelim" usually lasts a few minutes; an extraordinary one might go on for 30 - 45. Five and a quarter hours is unheard-of, and contributed decisively to a twelve hour workday. Now, when my ADHD-addled brain is forced into long and intense periods of concentration on any subject other than writing, I emerge from the trials exhausted and in dire need of letting my mind ramble in any direction it pleases. This is how I relax and unwind without bellying up to a bar, something I have largely given up since I began to lose weight five months ago. So buckle up, friends, because I am going to hit you with yet another glimpse into the chaos and disorder which lies between my ears:

* I have now lived back East again for over three years, and am still getting used to the idea of seasons. In Southern California, we have two of them: one is called Summer, and the other, Not Summer. Summer does not require an explanation, except that it lasts about twice as long as an Eastern summer, say 5 - 7 months. Not Summer is a kind of leftover, which at its coldest and wettest may vaguely resemble winter, but generally feels like very mild fall weather, with chilly nights but temperate days. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, distinct seasons, though certainly affected by climate change, still exist and often pack a wallop. Tonight, for example, still a few days shy of Thanksgiving, it is 44 degrees and raining hard. Do not take this as a complaint. I desperately missed seasons when I lived in Los Angeles and now that I have them, I greatly enjoy them, even when they manifest in such a grim way as tonight. The truth is that I grew terribly bored of the "endless summer" teenage wardrobe that SoCal demands; little is more pitiful than a middle-aged man dressing like he's still in high school.

* Last weekend I was in Miami to accept the Reader's Favorite Gold Medal for my fourth novel Sinner's Cross. I had never been to Miami before, and I must say, since we're talking about the weather, that it reminded me very much of L.A., what with the palm trees and the diversity of faces and slight to middling shabbiness; the exceptions being humidity and the ultra-prevalence of Cuban music. One cannot, of course, learn much about a city in 48 hours, but I got a taste of it, anyway, and even slammed down a hideous, fruit-infested, drink called a Miami Vice, which reminded me to do a "Memory Lane" blog about that iconic 80s show. I suppose residents of the actual city tire quickly of references to it, but for me, Miami will always and forever be associated with Crockett and Tubbs, just as Las Vegas will forever be associated (in my mind) with CSI. The funny thing is that, as a former entertainment industry stooge, I know how little cities portrayed on television actually resemble themselves in real life. It's all fakery and sleight of hand. All that having been said, I enjoyed my brief visit, and even more than that, enjoyed receiving recognition for my book. Such moments of triumph are rare for authors, and must be savored: you will forgive us if we crow about them.

* Working twelve hours seems monumental to me now, but when I worked in the entertainment industry, anything less than this figure struck me as shockingly slight. On film location, I have worked a 24 hour day almost entirely on my feet, and in video games I once clocked 29 hours straight, albeit from the seated position. I have experienced 80 - 100 hour workweeks for months on end, and in these very pages documented a 30 day "workweek." I know there are people who work much harder; I am just pointing this out because as a government worker, I seldom go over 40. The difference, of course, is consequence. A mistake on a movie or film set or a video game studio is important in the sense it costs money and possibly standing; a mistake in the criminal justice and law enforcement world can be disastrous. If people in my line of work seem unnaturally drained by four-thirty, it's usually a question of responsibility, not laziness.

* Another thing I will say in favor of the much-maligned "government worker" is that the stereotype of the lazy, sullen, slovenly drone who sits at a cubicle, listlessly tapping a keyboard while awaiting quitting time and never doing a stroke of avoidable work, is far more apropros of highly paid private sector workers than it is of the vast majority of GC's I've worked with in Pennsylvania or Maryland, or who I saw in Washington, D.C. growing up. In my experience, government workers, far from getting paid little to do nothing, are usually massively overworked, and spend most of their shifts hustling ceaselessly from one half-finished task to the next: if anything, most wish they could work a few extra hours just to clear their desks. If it seems as if they never accomplish anything, it is because emptying the ocean with a spoon is hard work. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, the hardest workers I have ever seen were in public service jobs that paid, in some cases, a third or even a quarter of what that person could make in the private sector. In contrast, the best gigs I worked in California all but encouraged laziness and a facetious, sophomoric, surfer-boy approach to work.

* Incidentally, I was asked recently by a police officer if I missed Hollywood. The answer was no. Sometimes, however, we lie without realizing it when asked questions of this sort, so I gave the matter some thought in private afterwards, and came to the same conclusion. My experience in the industry was fascinating and occasionally deeply rewarding, but like living in the dormitory when I was a freshman in college, it is more fun to reflect upon than it was to experience, and while I wouldn't trade it for anything, I am not sure I would ever repeat it -- not, at least, on the terms I was forced to accept before. Hollywood thrives on naive enthusiasm and a willingness to work very hard indeed for bum pay, little or no credit, and (sometimes) less than zero respect. Enduring this, and learning from it, has made me a much tougher, savvier negotiator in the publishing world than I ever was a journeyman effects artist or industry flunky: I can and do say "no" to projects that don't pay me enough, or deprive me of credit for work done. I learn slowly and painfully, but I do learn.

* Speaking (more) of work done: Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus is now ready for release: I just have to decide when, exactly, I'm going to release it. A book tour is scheduled in March of 2024, so with the end of the year drawing nigh, I'm thinking Christmas Week the most likely time, perhaps with a brief pre-order available via Amazon. You may or may not remember that this novel, my fifth, is a full length prequel to the novella Deus Ex I released at the end of 2021. Because I am telling the story of Magnus out of order, in different ways and through different points of view, I may have a bit of a time moving this novel. However, since it is a passion project, written out of the sheer love of storytelling rather than commercial reasons, I don't give a damn: I've discovered that if one is patient and relentless, the audience will eventually take their seats. It may be a small audience, but that is also irrelevant: as I once said in an interview, writing isn't something I do, it's something I am. And I do carry one maxim from the entertainment industry to heart at all times: whether the audience is 50,000 or 50 or 5, put out the same damned energy. After all, they paid for the show.

REFLECTIONS ON, AND OF, DOMENIC DA VINCI

If you're not cop, you're little people. -- Bryant, Blade Runner

Get used to the name: Domenic Da Vinci. You will be seeing a lot of it in these blogs over the next year or so, and don't worry if it means nothing to you. It means nothing to most folks nowadays. It is often the fate of the best books, the best movies, the best television shows, to exist on the edges of obscurity, never completely fading into it, but never emerging into the golden glow of true recognition, either.

Perhaps this is for the best. We all know, don't we, that the great unwashed masses, the lumpenproletariat, wouldn't know quality if it beat the shit out of them in a well-lighted alley? And we also know that being part of a cult audience of any kind, whether musical or cinematic or what have you, is deeply rewarding. Well, Da Vinci's Inquest a television show which ran from 1998 - 2008 in one form or another on the Canadian Broadcast Channel and various regional channels in the northern United States, is the type of nectar best savored only by the truly discriminating palate. I intend to discuss the show and its characters and themes in great detail here in the future, believing there is great literary merit in the lessons of this television show, so I'll leave off everything else now except this very brief explanation of just what the hell it was about:

Inquest followed Domenic Da Vinci, a divorced, non-recovering alcoholic coroner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. The former undercover narc uses the power of the Coroner's Mandate to investigate suspicious deaths hand-in-hand with the Vancouver Homicide squad, and to make recommendations for how future tragedy may be avoided. He walks a whiskey-blurred line between police work and social justice, fighting pitched battles over Canada's drug policies, trying to shield sex workers from serial predation, and generally tilting a lance at ever windmill of societal evil he can find, no matter how small. Naturally, this leaves his personal life a smoldering wreck. Da Vinci is the sort who is absolutely rock solid on the job but wobbly as hell away from it: his nights are spent in drunken stupors in dive bars, or slumped in his undershirt in front of a hockey game on television with all the lights off. He can't keep a woman. He fights with his friends as much as his enemies. Everything about him seems to indicate he will die alone, and while it's never examined to any real extent, we get the impression that when he's sober and not working, he doesn't have the faintest idea what the hell to do with himself, which is why he's generally either bagged or on the clock. As he puts it: "Some nights I think things are going to hell, and other nights I know it's just me. Maybe I've reached a time in my life when I have to think what the hell I'm going to do: hide under the blanket, or get up and join the war again."

It has been said that the best books are the ones we think are about us; the ones that speak directly to our souls. It is the same with film, and with television. I have watched Da Vinci's Inquest from start to finish five or six times over the last few years, with ever-deepening appreciation for its writing, acting, honesty, grittiness, and sense of social responsibility. I credit the show, which I discovered when I was still living in Burbank and working in the entertainment industry, for inspiring me to move East and return to "The Job" -- the world of criminal justice. But it was not until last night that I began to understand that there is a much deeper and more personal angle here, one which, as I just said, speaks to my very soul.

I have long pondered exactly why so many talented, intelligent people, who could make big money in the private sector if they so chose, dedicate their lives, and often destroy those lives, to work low-paying, high-stress, generally thankless public service jobs. I myself have spent almost ten years in such work, and in a purely material sense have absolutely nothing to show for it. When I started as a parole officer in 1997, I made $19,800 a year. These were poverty wages even 25 years ago, and they did not much improve over time: at the district attorney's office, five years later, where I was a unit supervisor, my salary was a whopping $31,000. You can starve on those wages, and I did so neatly and effectively, living a life of working poverty (which you can examine in a previous blog I wrote years ago entitled "Life on £1 a week"), but you cannot really live on them. I wore a suit and tie, carried a badge, had a job of some societal prestige...and went hungry. And yet walking away from that live was damnably difficult. Financially, it is no different for me now. Any savings I actually have, and it is not much, comes from stocks, bonds, or writing paydays. Indeed, I make less money as an advocate for victims of crime in a district attorney's office, than I did as a bottom-level make up effects artist at KNB Studios a few years ago. I can theoretically retire in nine years, but if I do, my pension wouldn't do much more than pay my mortgage: little things like utilities, food, gas and so on would necessitate a second income, something considerably more than I presently make as a writer. In a purely corporeal sense, I am inviting geriatric poverty by doing what i do.

Now, I don't normally do this, but I am going to share a slightly edited passage from my journal which explains why. I adduce this because every writer is or ought to be a student of human moves, and there is no human which requires a better understanding of a writer than himself:

"I was philosophical generally this evening. I think it's because I started a much-needed rewatch of Da Vinci's Inquest, which is like a bath in steel for me; it refreshes my will to continue. Of course I reluctantly realize that life is not a television show, but what I was thinking about today was how certain persistent memories I have, and certain experiences I'm having now, weave rather neatly into the story I am watching onscreen. Specifically, I remember coming home to the Haines Building at dusk on those coldly beautiful late fall days in, say, 2000 or so, and eating at the counter of the diner on the ground floor. Those wintry sunsets -- yellow and charcoal -- were lovely, like something out of the opening chapters of The Great Gatsby but also piercingly, cruelly lonely. At the time I probably thought that loneliness was simply simply of an acute, post-breakup character; my run-down flat in the Haines, with its grease-yellowed kitchen and peeling paint, seemed an appropriate backdrop for my new and unwated singlehood. I did not realize how easy it is for someone in my profession (the profession I had at the time, I mean; and again, now) to be alone all the time. I was thinking of that tonight when I came home, after an endless, uncomfortable day spent in a cold magisterial district justice's office, to an empty refrigerator and a sink full of dirty dishes. Oh, I improvised a meal from odds and ends – just the sort of thing Da Vinci might have done. This cold, unappetizing grub did the job, but it was deeply unsatisfying. Like masturbation, like morphine, it is an anodyne, not a cure. But there is a curiously addictive quality to the sort of life Da Vinci leads – a life of work, alcoholism, quarrels, and causes. A life of cheap Scotch and cold pizza. A life of professional friends, professional enemies, and the occasional love affair, inevitably bungled amid much cursing and acrimony. A life, in short, given up to a job that doesn't want you, need you, or like you, nor show you any particular respect, and one which will likely breathe a sigh of relief when you're gone; and in any case, forget you quickly – 'What ever happened to Da Vinci, anyway? That son of a bitch.'

"I think that's what haunts me about Inquest when I watch it. Yes, it hails from that last portion of time before social media, before 'mobile devices' and all their attendant problems and stupidities, a time I mythologize and nostalgify; but no, it's the idea of what Hawkeye Pierce likened to “a bunch of people huddling in a doorway during a thunderstorm,” who form a brief, close alliance and then scatter as soon as the clouds disappear. Da Vinci and his crew of pathologists, coroners, cops and politicians are together because of circumstance. And that's what The Job -- his job, my job -- is like. People are placed under pressure. They form bonds under that pressure. Alliances are produced. Enemies are made. Stresses are endured. Battles are fought, won and lost. It goes on for years, this unlikely confluence: you get to know each other, you drink together, eat together, attend parties together, see the inside of each other's houses and apartments, share secrets and shames. And then someone quits or is fired, and before you know it, before you would even want to believe it would be possible, they are forgotten. The pitched battles, the bitter arguments, the nagging recriminations, the beer-sodden assurances of loyalty, the silly jokes, the elevator confessionals, the shared moments of amusement, humiliation, epiphany, triumph, defeat; who the hell is even left to remember them after just a year or two? Life on The Job is like life in a WW2 fighter squadron, where the danger and the glory and the fear and the camraderie are real, but the dead are washed away with their blood and relegated to a shadowy, seldom-visited corner of the mind. Nothing lasts. Not pilots. Not aircraft. Only the mission.

"There's an element of existential agony in these reflections, certainly; but more than element of truth. When I think of the fictive battles Da Vinci, Shannon, Leary, Kosmo, Savoy and all the rest of them fought over those seven, eight years in Vancouver, and I think of the passage of time since, I think if I went – fictively – back to Vancouver Homicide and the Coroner's Service, and said their names, I'd get a bunch of, “Huh? What? Who?” It was like that the other day, when chance took me into the Probation Department. I recognized and was recognized by a solitary face: all the rest were strangers, no more interested in me than I was in them. You pour yourself into the vessel for years, even for decades, only to find the vessel has no bottom and the bonding tension of its interior is so smooth you leave not a trace upon its walls. You come and go like a ghost.

"And yet.

"And yet knowing all this, experiencing all the frustration, being underpaid, overworked, disrespected, and grasping completely how futile it all is, there's a curious romance to it all. It's romance of a curious character, for true: because it's inextricably mixed up with self-pity, with a need or at least a want for self-martyrdom: there is a melodramatic, self-conscious relish for the life of a Film Noir detective, with his five-day growth of beard and cigarette addiction, his unpaid bills and alimony payments. One must go into the job with a knowledge, and indeed a relish, for one's own ultimate destruction: the broken marriage, the estranged children, the crippling debts, the bleeding ulcer, the societal ingratitude, and the final, prison-like loneliness of the boarding house. There is a neon-lighted romance to this, because you're nobody's sucker: the cards are on the table and you sit down at the table of your own free will.

"Why? Why?

"This is the question that haunts me, because it concerns me. Me, Miles Girard Watson. When I speak of Domenic Da Vinci, fictional character of a half-forgotten Canadian television show, I am speaking of myself and everyone like me. Everyone who allows themselves to be nailed to a cross, and indeed, controls the nail concession and even loans out the hammer. In studying Da Vinci -- I am just realizing this now, as I write the words -- I am looking at something of a reflection, which is probably what draws me so closely and intensely to this series. Da Vinci is a realistic-looking man with realistic flaws. He's intelligent, humorous, hard-working, morally courageous, street savvy, and is generally on the right side of things; he fills out a necessary role in society and does it extremely well...but he is often difficult to like. He can be petty, childish, and needlessly antagonistic, enjoying conflict for its own sake and seldom pausing to count the cost in human collateral. He often goes off half-cocked, and does not understand the concept of picking one's battles; he equates political sense with cowardice, and losing a good fight with virtue. He has a superiority complex and his hands are filthy from shifting the goalposts. He's a pain in the ass and a son a bitch; but as Harry Truman once remarked about a certain Latin American dictator, 'He's our son of a bitch.' A rebel angel who somehow remains in the service of God, blaspheming under his breath but doing all the right thing. Usually.

"So what is the appeal of this person, and the life he leads? There is a surface answer – several of them, actually. One is simply that he's addicted to the game. To the quiet adrenaline rush of the jury trial, or the subtler pleasures of sipping coffee and trading war stories with cops and lawyers in some Godforsaken magisterial district justice's office on the fringes of nowhere in the middle of a snowstorm. To the feeling of self-importance you get walking down the courthouse steps in your finest threads with your briefcase swinging after your side wins the big case. To the goosebumps you experience when you help some wounded, weary victim of crime navigate the broken wreckage of the system and reach a safe harbor. To the heartfelt 'thank you' that is worth much more than my meager paycheck, especially when uttered by someone with no inherent trust in the system.

"But there's something deeper than this: freedom. It's a curiously free life. You know you're fucked, but you're fucked in a different way from most. Everyone wastes the best years of their lives at work, but at least we, the players in this great game, waste it in a meaningful way. We are not the 'little people' Bryant talks about in Blade Runner. We play for real stakes – human lives. Our triumphs can change the course of those lives. Our defeats can do this, too. We are not selling bath soaps or time shares or working swing-shift at the rubber vomit factory. We don't count beans or crunch numbers. What we do actually matters. And when you step away from that, when you turn in your tin and go get a "real job" in the "private sector," you do it at first with relief, as a man might feel when stepping away from a ledge, but also with a profound and ever-growing sense of loss, of inadequacy. Because as I said before, there is something horribly, fatally attractive to finding a single slice of congealed pizza in the fridge, and eating it with a cold, flat beer as you sit in your wife-beater in front of re-runs of "Three's Company" at four in the morning. In damnation comes a profound sense of mission, and the most sublime sense of willful self-sacrifice. You're finished and you know it, but by God, you're cool in a gritty, sixteen-millimeter, down-at-heel kind of way. Other people crunch numbers. They push paper. They debug code. You traffic in human hopes. Isn't that worth your own?"

I suppose this comes off as melodramatic and vaguely insulting. I don't mean it to be: like Da Vinci, I want to do more good than harm. But it is the way that I do in fact feel about my profession and my life: a curious combination of exuberance and existential woe, child-like joy and sickening dread. Because the dirty dishes in the sink, the empty refrigerator, the busted bank account, the failed relationships and ever-approaching prospect of Golden Years which are anything but, are real things: they creep up on me in the watches of the night when I can't sleep. They whisper seditiously that I will end up in that boarding house with cardboard boxes full of yellowing photographs and dusty awards nobody gives a shit about, mumbling to the ghosts of friends and lovers who long, along ago left my life and forgot who the hell I was, except, perhaps, to mutter, "Whatever happened to Miles Watson, anyway? That son of a bitch."

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY"

I think you would agree that Memory Lane is a place full of wonderful old mansions, of vast villas and rambling estates, in which it is easy to get lost and even easier to remain so. Pop culture nostalgia is a powerful thing, and sometimes, if we are not careful, or if we are feeling a little too keenly a yearning for a particular part of our youth, we can lose ourselves in these spaces, which remain intact and well-maintained despite the passage of years since their cancellation. When one thinks about a show of yesteryear like "Magnum, P.I." or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Frasier," one gets the sense that the lights are still on, the furniture is neatly in place, and while the door hinges may be in need of a dash of oil, the appliances would still work if you cared to use them, and the wine in the cellar would taste agreeably sweet. In short, you would feel very much at home.

But along with the vast edifices we have previously explored, shows which ran for many seasons and had appreciable cultural impact, there are also places which are as small as summer cottages, and upon closer inspection -- once we push past the creepers and vines which have overgrown their decaying wood beams -- we see that the series in question were never even completed during their own lifetimes. What lies beneath the moss and cobwebs is incomplete as well as half lost in the weeds, abandoned before its time. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" (1982 - 1983) is such a show. It existed only briefly, it died an unfair and unnatural death, and its star was retroactively tainted by a scandal which broke decades after the series left the airwaves. In short, it is quite forgotten by all save television historians and those who grew up in the early 80s. Yet it has a place on Memory Lane, however small, because it speaks to something which lies deep within the heart of every small boy, now as then.

I should begin stating flatly that, not only in retrospect but at the time it aired, "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was an easy show to make fun of. It is full of worn-out clichés, embarrassing stereotypes, stupid dialogue, needless narration, bad blue screen effects, cruddy matte paintings, ill-fitting stock footage, archaic costumes, cringeworthy acting, fake sets and utterly preposterous plots. When fans try to defend this series against ridicule or even room-temperature observational criticism, they often begin by pretending as if this isn't so, and thus discredit their own arguments before they can even get going. I would never make the case that "Tales" was great television taken as such. I would actually start by acknowledging that in many ways it was terrible television...and then explain just why that doesn't make a halluva lot of difference.

"Tales" was concieved by the legendary writer-producer Donald P. Bellisario, who, along with Glen Larson and Stephen J. Cannell, is inarguably one of the pillars upon which modern TV rests. He was the brain behind "Magnum, P.I.", "Airwolf," "Quantum Leap," "JAG," and "NCIS" (which is still running after twenty years). Contrary to popular opinion, it was not a slapped-together imitation of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which exploded onto movie screens in 1981, but an old idea which had been stewing on a back burner called "development" for years before the success of RAIDERS pushed it to the front of the stove. "Tales" is in fact a series which even in 1982 was a rare breed: the action-adventure show, with emphasis on adventure. It recreated a period in history (the last period in history, actually) when vast areas of the Earth were still unconquered, and thus adventure and exploration still possible: the pre-WW2 age of colonial empire. We forget it now, but there was a time within the living memory of some people when a large portion of this planet still slept in the pre-industrial era, and wandering too far off the map could get you eaten by cannibals, devoured by wild beasts, or plunk you down amidst the ruins of a lost city. When men and women who lived on the edge of that map literally straddled the line between civilization and savagery, the known world and the deep blue. It was an era of explorers, treasure-hunters, missionaries, smugglers, sailors, silk-scarfed pilots, drunken storytellers, one-eyed traders, pirate, crooks, spies, unscrupulous businessmen, absinthe-sodden colonial governors, dispossessed tribesmen, and ruthless empire-builders. And that is what "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was all about. That brawling, half-tamed lawless time when half the world was an unknown quantity and wonder was still possible. Think "Magnum P.I." train-wrecked into "Indiana Jones" (with just a little "Land of the Lost" sprinkled on top) and you have "Tales Of The Gold Monkey." It's the chaos and rawness of the Wild West, but with .45s instead of six guns, twin-engined aircraft instead of horses, and palm trees instead of tumbleweed.

The premise of "Tales" was dead simple. An ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins), his drunken, memory-challenged sidekick Corky (Jeff Mackay), and their one-eyed dog Jack (Leo the Dog) operate their seaplane, Cutter's Goose, out of the fictional island of Boragora, somewhere in the Marivellas Islands of the South Pacific, in the last few years before the outbreak of WW2, when a great deal of the world was owned by colonial powers. When our heroes are not flying supplies, mail or passengers to this or that far-flung outpost in the French or Japanese mandates, they are belly-up at the Monkey Bar, which is operated by the island's enigmatic magistrate Bon Chance Louie (Ron Moody in the pilot, Roddy McDowell in the series). In the bar are likely to be found Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O'Heany), a redheaded lounge singer and American spy; the Reverend Willie Tenboom (John Calvin), who is also a spy, albeit for Nazi Germany; and Gushie, a crippled ex-member of the Foreign Legion (Les Jankey). Pushing through the saloon doors every now and again are the villainous but charming Japanese princess Koji (the super-lovely Marta DuBois, staple femme fatale of the 80s and 90s) and her grumpy samurai henchman Todo (the ubiquitous John Fujioka, in full samurai rig), who longs to cut off Jake's head. With a group like this, where nearly everyone is hiding secrets from each other and unknowingly working at cross-purposes, you just know all sorts of wacky adventures are going to ensue, and believe me, they do. Over the course of the season (sadly, the only one the show ever produced), Jake & Co. come up against human traffickers, spies, cultists, boys raised by apes, treasure hunters, giant octopi, rebel insurgents, angry mobs, Japanese Zeroes, Nazis, ancient curses, and pretty much anything else you can think of. (In one memorable episode, samurai warriors battle huge, semi-carniverous monkeys.) It's incredibly silly, cheesy, clichéd and outlandish, ripping off from just about every old movie and Western you can think of, and often looking as if it were shot entirely on dusty old sets on the studio backlot...which in fact it was...but it's also great, great fun. And this is a large part of why it still occupies space, however overgrown and bug-eaten, in Memory Lane.

"Tales" is a show that made up for in heart and good, clean adventure what it lacked in other places. Though it was shot in 1982, it was essentially the product of a much earlier era, the era of the sensational tales written for boys and young men back in pulp magazines the 20s, 30s and 40s, which Bellasario undoubtedly grew up on, and that sense of lighthearted, "fistfights are fun, don't-worry-it's-just-a-flesh-wound" heroics, percolates all throughout the series. When Jake revs up the coughing, smoking motors of Cutter's Goose, we know that just over the glimmering Pacific horizon lies adventure, treasure, good-looking women, and sweaty, squinty-eyed villains of all races who cheat at cards and sell people into slavery. I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to watching this show every week when I was ten years old, or how bitter I was when it failed to be renewed for a second season. All children, especially boys, long for adventure, for dangerous quests in faraway and exotic lands. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" gave me all that, and when it disappeared, a piece of my childhood disappeared with it. I loved Jake Cutter because, like Thomas Magnum, he was a badass under pressure, but rather a dumbass when the pressure was off: he fumbled romances, got thrown through windows, lost at cards, tried in vain to keep Corky sober, and everlastingly argued with his one-eyed dog Jake. He was heroic but relatable, and his fondness for cigars, eye for the ladies and passion for baseball gave him just enough spice to escape the Dudley Doorite dullness that sometimes afflicted 80s-era heroes.

The bitterness of the pill was accentuated by the fact that "Tales" was cancelled not because of low ratings, but due to a pissing contest between Bellisario and ABC network executives: Bellisario wanted the show to stay reasonably grounded, with stories about spying, smuggling, and so forth, while the suits wanted more extreme plotlines that blurred the lines between adventure and fantasy. Bellisario would not budge, so to spite him, the series was relegated to the dustbin, an act that reportedly caused rival networks to literally uncork champagne, since they believed "Tales" was potential mega-hit which would have run as long as seven seasons. Such is Hollywood, then as now, a fact which brings me no comfort...now or then.

So where does that leave us? Does "Tales" have any relevance forty years down the road? Are there lessons to be learned from its brief existence? Can a show that ran a single year have a legacy? Does it deserve one, romanticizing colonialism as it was sometimes accused of doing?

I would argue that "Tales" is actually more relevant and more necessary now, despite all of its early-80s silliness, than it was back then. The age we live in is cynical, and cynicism is the opposite of wonder. Kids nowadays sit in front of first-person shooter video games, Snapchat and Tik Tok with glassed-over eyes, and seldom get a chance to flex the adventure-muscles that are every child's absolute birthright. "Tales" harkens back to a time when the craving for adventure was accepted as a natural function of boyhood and girlhood, as craving for unearned fame and gross material wealth is today. It presupposes that there are realms beyond the border of electric light and air conditioning, where people have to live by their wits or die, something every Western child should consider in this age of flabby keyboard warriors and porn-addicted, basement-dwelling trolls. The fact that it expired after only a year, despite ratings success, serves as a salutary warning about the role of ego in the decision-making process: Bellisario, in my mind, was right to fight for his vision of the show, but naive and silly to let the fight escalate to the point where men obsessed with money were willing to sacrifice hefty future profits just to step on his dream. The very act of bringing a television series into existence is a vast series of painful and occasionally humiliating compromises, conducted for the greater good: it is the painful intersection of the commercial and the artistic, and that intersection is usually littered with blood and wreckage. Bellisario knew this better than anyone. He could have been more strategic, chosen his battles more carefully. In the modern parlance, however, he chose violence, and the people employed by the show, and its many fans, paid the price.

Now we come to the last point. Did "Tales" romanticize colonialism, European or otherwise? The answer, as is so often the case in questions like this, is yes, and no. It is often taken for granted in the series that European colonialism is reasonable or at least justifiable or unquestionable, just as it is taken for granted that Japanese aspirations of this type are inherently sinister. Few of the episodes question the fact that so much of the world was divvied up between a few European powers like so much pie at a Thanksgiving feast. Moreover, native anti-colonialists, though depicted, are not always painted in a good light, but rather as embittered, angry disruptors of the social order; and the whole mystique of mercenaries, smugglers, explorers, spies and and so forth, playing poker in the Monkey Bar beneath clouds of cigar smoke as they plotted their next adventure, is undoubtedly rooted in a deep nostalgia for this era: indeed, as I have said, it is a large part of the show's appeal, just as it is a large part of the appeal of the Indiana Jones films. But it would be unfair to say that "Tales" simply ignored the evils of colonialism. The episode "Shangheid" tackled modern-day slavery, while "Escape from Death Island" chronicled the cruelty of French penal colonies. "Boragora or Bust" centers around the exploitation of mineral rights, while "A Distant Shout of Thunder" directly addresses native hostility and resentment to colonial domination. The writers were not entirely blind to the nature of the world their characters were living.

I don't mean to imply that "Tales" offered sophisticated commentary on this subject or any other; only that it was not completely lacking in nuance (the character of Willy Tenboom, for example, was a German spy, but manifestly not a Nazi; his main interest was bedding nubile island girls, and he often pitched in to help Jake). The show may have romanticized the age and the setting, but its moral compass was firmly in place: right remained right, wrong remained wrong. It was manifestly on the side of the little man against the big man, for individuality and, ultimately, the freedom that comes with living on the edge of the world, where law is more of an idea than a reality, and civilization comes in the form of once-a-month clippers full of mail, cigars, phonograph records and whisky. My ultimate verdict is this: if you're a parent of a youngish kid, "Tales" is as good an antidote for today's world as anything out there. And if you happened to be growing up in the early 80s, it's a fabulous flight down Memory Lane.

THE HOBBIT ON THE ROCKS IS CRYING (A RANT)

FRODO: I'm going to Mordor alone, Sam.
SAM: I know! And I'm coming with you.

Rewatching The Lord of the Rings, now a quarter century old, I was struck by how human these films are, and how universal and timeless their values: friendship, loyalty, courage, duty, honor, sacrifice. There is nothing in the LOTR movies which has aged a day or will not be equally valid a century from now.

Modern movies tend to suck in large part because they are unable to produce memorable dialog or relatable characters we actually care about. They don't instruct; they condescend. They don't make music, they make noise. The bar for storytelling is not low; it is on the ground. Writers who might have once, generously, been allowed to sharpen pencils on a studio lot are now making millions to give us shit that could have been written by AI. And by AI, I mean the sort of AI which once opposed me in a game of "Pong."

In Braveheart, William Wallace tells Robert the Bruce, "Your title gives you claim to the throne of our country; but men don't follow titles, they follow courage." Not only is this a great line, it's also true of Hollywood: the title gives it claim to our attention and money, but people do not follow titles, they follow stories. And good storytelling is dependent on basic principles. Almost every movie I've seen in recent years is...content. Not art. Not even good popcorn entertainment: content. Disposable and forgettable. They differ from the bad movies of yesteryear in that they do not even try to be good. Nor is there any real attempt at originality. I can hardly think of an A-list, theatrical release movie I've seen in recent years which had any new ideas in it at all. On the other hand, I have seen almost every major legacy franchise and many minor ones desecrated out of recognition by reboots, spin-offs, remakes, sequels, prequels, and "re-imaginings" that attempt to "fix" what was never broken in the first place.

Making a great movie is not easy, but the principles that drive great movies are easy to understand. Audiences want to be entertained, sure, but they also want to be inspired and have the deeper values of humankind affirmed...after being put to a harsh test. From Rocky to Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker to Bilbo Baggins, it's all about the journey.

There and back again.

Modern movie writers need to understand why people go to the movies in the first place.

PROHIBITION EDITION

George Orwell once made a joke about "the horror of the English Sunday." He was referring to the boredom endured by all Englishmen on this day, due to the fact that all pubs, and nearly all businesses, were forcibly closed by law, leaving the populace with nothing to do except go for long walks...or go to church. Needless to say, it was the Church of England which lay behind these laws: they didn't want competition, and so did everything in their power to eliminate it and make uncomfortable wooden pews, dull sermons and off-key singing more palatable to people who would have preferred a pint and a game of football. It didn't really work, most prohibitions don't, and it merely created boredom and resentment from the people; but it was enforced rigorously for centuries -- indeed, long after the Church lost both its power and its relevancy, the horror of its blue laws persisted.

The need governments, religious groups and so forth feel to bludgeon supposedly free people into doing "what's best for them" is a source of ongoing fascination for me. I first noticed this phenomena when I was attending college in Pennsylvania many years ago. As someone born in Illinois and raised in Maryland, I was unfamiliar with PA blue laws until I ran headfirst into them as an undergraduate with a perpetual thirst for beer. I soon discovered two remarkable facts about the Commonwealth in which I attended school: the first was that Pennsylvanians drink an astonishing amount of alcohol. The second was that every form of legal nuisance had been created in order to separate them from their pints, wine bottles and fifths of whiskey.

You could not, in the Commonwealth of PA, buy liquor or wine anywhere but a state owned liquor store whose hours were designed to make them almost inaccessible to anyone working during normal business hours: they were briefly open on Saturday mornings, but not, of course, on Sundays. You could not buy beer at grocery or conveience stores, and the laws prevented other stores, or bars, from selling six packs unless they also had a food license and did a certain percentage of their business exclusively in food sales. (Beer purchased at these sorts of bars or restaurants was, of course, priced far above market value.) Thus, your only choice was a beer distributor: but these sold only cases or kegs. Simply going out and grabbing a six of brew somewhere was a tedious, complicated, often expensive task, and on Sundays, as often as not, people were forced to drive on down to Maryland to get what they wanted, something feasible only because my college town happened to be 20 miles from the state border. Indeed, those who forgot to stock up for Superbowl Sunday faced a choice of either going dry or on what might have been a very long trip.

In addition to the deliberate and systematic fragmentation of the way alcohol was sold, and not sold, in PA, there was also a continuous petty harassment on alcohol purchasers, conducted by the police and various liquor control entities. They used to set up shop near bars, distributors and liquor stores and try to catch under-age people buying the product, which I suppose is natural enough, except that even when those asked to produce identification did so and were proven to be of age, they were often treated like criminals: one police officer shouted at me and friends of mine because we "weren't much over twenty-one," which prompted my normally meek friend Steve to shout back, "What fucking difference does that make?" Another time during this same era, the proprietor of a bowling alley demanded not only that we produce identification, but that we sign legal paperwork in order to be served his special blend of flat, room-temperature beer. In a third incident, my friend Eddie was threatened with a citation by the Liquor Control Board, not because he was underage, but because he had "given agents the impression that he was hesitant to produce identification proving his age." I could provide reams of additional, anecdotal evidence from this period, including the time my valid passport was rejected as a form of identification in a liquor store, but you get the picture: the purchase of alcohol was made deliberately more difficult than necessary, and virtually impossible on Sundays.

And what was the net result of all this pettifogging, nitpicking, ticket-writing, blue-nosed interference? Pennsylvania was routinely on the list of the ten most drunken states in the Union. Not only college students but poor people, blue collar workers, and middle class folk of every description were forever emptying beer, malt liquor, rum, whiskey, vodka, hard lemonade, spiked sparkling water, mixed drinks and wine down their throats. The bars and nightclubs were jam-packed all night long. After-hours parties raged until three or four in the morning. The beer distributors did rip-roaring trade from Thursday noon to closing time on Saturday night, and the caravans down to the Maryland Line to bring back kegs of beer ran continuously on Sundays. On Monday mornings, the recycling bins and trash cans on my block were overflowing with bottles and cans, and on my way to work in my post-college career, I often saw people sitting on their stoops in all weather, early in the mornings, drinking 22 ounce bottles of Silver Thunder. And it is no use to say, as many do, that it would all have been worse if these barriers had not been put into place, for it is well known that banning things is one of the most effective means of making them attractive and popular to the masses. I was reminded of my grandmother's stories about the Prohibition Era, and how all it seemed to accomplish in Chicago was to make people thirstier.

There is, and always has been, a lively debate about the role of the state in the life of the individual citizen or subject, especially in a democracy, where people are supposed to have freedom of choice. The old Roman doctrine of parens patriae -- "the state is the parent" -- is right up there with the "social contract" theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau for its ability to provoke argument about the rights and obligations of the individual versus the rights and obligations of the group...or the government. The absurdity of entities we the people created for our own benefit making it more difficult for us to do something we desire, is wrapped around the quite logical idea that total freedom is anarchy, and anarchy is not freedom at all; and therefore we must be restrained to a degree if we cannot restrain ourselves. And yet it seems to me that freedom has very little value unless it includes the freedom to make personal choices about one's body and what one does with it. Knowing this, however, governments and religious organizations usually go at what they see as "the problem" (your freedom) sideways. Just as those who want to censor art or speech will never admit what they are doing is censorship, those who want to tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, etc. will very rarley admit they want to control your behavior. And if they do, they will usually say those dreaded parental words, "it's for your own good."

Many would argue this is factually true. Drinking alcohol is not very good for you, especially the way it tends to get consumed in small town Pennsylvania, where people work hard and play harder, and it leads directly to all manner of crimes, from physical and sexual assaults to drunk driving. The tax revenue it brings in is probably offset to a great degree by the vandalism, destruction, and criminality it also produces. And forms of the same argument can also be made about smoking, or eating fast food or junk food: efforts were recently made in various cities to outlaw everything from the Big Gulp to Skittles, because they are so wretchedly unhealthy. But this slope is very slippery indeed. Bacon is profoundly unhealthy, but the average American consumes 18 lbs of it per year. Refined sugar is even worse for you, and every American gets 60 lbs of added sugar in the same time frame, and I don't (yet) hear anyone calling for bans or controls on them.

The extent to which ordinary people can be trusted to live their own lives is at the core of democratic identity. If the state really is the parent, it has the right to set rules within its house: but is the state the parent, and if it is, is it a fit one? How does it draw the line between allowing its children freedom of choice and stepping in to protect them from harm? What is the difference between restraints for the good of the people and tyranny, however petty the tyranny may be? America was founded on the idea that government could not be trusted, that it bent naturally toward absolutism, and had to be restrained by as many checks and balances upon its own power as could be put into place without making it actually impossible to do its job. This idea has lost currency in recent generations, but in a curiously sideways manner: no one really trusts the government anymore, but millions believe it is fit to decide what its citizens can and cannot do...at least when they agree with whatever decision it happens to make in that regard.

The horror of the Pennsylvania Sunday began to slacken some years before I moved back here from California in 2020. The monopoly of the state liquor store was broken, beer and wine are now sold conditionally in grocery stores (and even some convenience stores), and I doubt such of the old Sunday blue laws as are still on the books or enforced prevent anyone from getting as tanked as they please on the Lord's day. This battle, waged so absurdly and bitterly for so many years, has been won and lost -- at least for now. But the larger issue of why institutions created by human beings, so often fight against the wishes of human beings, and whether this is a good thing or an evil one, or falls into some nebulous third category, is a subject which deserves ongoing study.